Entwined
by Forest of Zen
Summary: A follow-up to 'Beneath the Tree of Voices', set a year later. Rated 'M' for slightly more explicit content.


I wrote this from 12:00 AM to 3:00 AM, so needless to say, this may be a little different than what I usually write. Sleep depravation does some interesting things to your mind. More than ever, I need comments--what I did right, what I did wrong, where I can improve, what I should keep, et cetera. I hope you enjoy.

* * *

"This was home."

It looked like a meteor had hit, or a bomb. Splinters were everywhere, and even a year later, thousands upon thousands of dead leaves still covered the ground. The branches that hadn't gotten too brittle to support their own weight still reached higher than all the surrounding trees; higher than the many Hometrees that the Omaticaya now resided in.

Jake stayed silent. He hadn't been there long—three months was barely enough to call any place home. But he still remembered it. The hammocks of the sleeping areas, the _Ikran_ roosts among the top branches, the fires that had burned at the very bottom, where tribe members had told stories that he had barely been able to decipher. And then the Top Branch, with a Na'vi name so long that he had barely been able to pronounce it, let along remember it. From there, on clear days, the Hallelujah Mountains were visible off in the distance, serenely unaware of the laws of nature.

And he remembered what had brought it down all too well. Neytiri did too.

"This was Omaticaya, since the Time of the First Songs. Our home. My home."

It was the second time they had come back to the original Hometree since the battle. The first priority after the mercifully brief war had ended was sending the humans back home, and then it was decommissioning Hell's Gate—every nonessential area but the lab and Avatar chambers was either destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and all weapons were flown to the Tree of Souls and stockpiled. Just in case.

Then they had buried the dead.

They had come to Hometree first, and it had been harder then. The bodies were still fresh; Eywa had mercifully left them untouched, although the natural effects of the forests had already started to appear in some.

Jake had initially thought there wouldn't be many, or maybe just hoped. But when he had first walked through the area beside the fallen trunk, there were dozens. More than a hundred, easily. On his first walk.

The process was agonizing, rites performed for each, all buried in a clear spot where a new tree could grow. All returned to Eywa. But they had never left Jake's mind.

Beyral. Tsu'tey. Sylwanin. Ninat. Eytukan. All dead in the span of two days, gone at the whim of some corporation nearly five light-years away. Neytiri closed her eyes and let her head drop, ears drooping along with it.

"Jake?"

"Yeah?"

"Why did you save us?"

The question left her lips and wrapped itself around Jake's tongue, and he couldn't find a way to respond. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. Still nothing.

Why _had_ he?

"It was..."

Her ears flicked back, then forward again. He was lost in thought, trying to think back to when everything had been confusion, when he'd been two bodies, two minds instead of one. Back to when the world was smoke and flame and chaos, to when the smell of wood smoke and ash had been the only thing left.

He still didn't know.

He could have left, let the bulldozers demolish the trees, let the Scorpions burn Hometree to the ground with incendiaries and never looked back. He could have gotten his other legs back and been able to run again, and when the mining on Pandora was finished he would have had free reign in his Avatar, able to fly or ride wherever he would.

But he hadn't.

"I don't know."

She looked at him sidelong, eyes not especially surprised, mouth faintly curved in a smile. Now he was the one with his head down, thinking.

When he had woken up again, nothing had made sense. Everything was grey. The sky was ash, the ground was ash, and anything that moved was a ghost. In the whitish fog For a moment he hadn't been able to focus, and then he had remembered Grace, and the entire reason he had come back to his Avatar.

"Grace. At first, anyway. To save Grace."

Neytiri looked at him, this time with an edge of the 'are-you-more-of-a-skxawng-than-I-thought' look she had given him so many times in the past.

"Toruk Makto... for Grace?"

Jake smiled. "Sometimes your entire life boils down to one insane move. It was the only thing that I could think of to get you to... huh. Maybe that was it. To get you to listen."

She turned back to look at the fallen tree in the distance.

"I was scared."

"I knew that. Hell, I was scared. But I _had_ to get all of you to listen, or everything would have been destroyed. I did it because..."

The moment stretched on to an imagined infinity, Jake grabbing desperately in his mind for the words. Finally, he found them.

"Because I loved it. All of it. The forest, Eywa, you. I fell in love. _Why_ did it take so long to remember that?"

Neytiri smiled, turning to look at him. "Because it is part of you now. You carry it with you." She put a hand to his chest. "The love is inside you."

He nodded. "But how _could_ I let you go? I couldn't just... _leave_."

"And yet the other sky-people did. When we asked them." She grinned, sharp teeth showing prominently. Jake remembered vividly her idea of 'asking'. A lot of it involved prodding with spear tips, or the threat of it.

"Yeah, they went all right. They're somewhere out there now."

He waved a hand toward the side of the sky opposite Polyphemus, which still glared at them with a massive stormy blue eye. Neytiri smiled sadly, then looked back to the tree.

"Thank you."

The words were soft-spoken, but the truth gave them weight. Jake hadn't heard those words from her yet, and all this time he thought she had still hated him, even if only a fragment of that hatred was left. But after a year of cleaning up, patching wounds, moving and settling again, he finally felt free.

* * *

The Hometrees were a lot smaller than the original single tree had been, but they still stood well above the surrounding forest, and on the edge of the waterfall's massive cliff, the view was still incredible. The bioluminescent night made the algae under the waterfall's thundering flow glow like an aurora, and the spray came up in a mist that was a rainbow of colors. Adventurous _Ikran Makto_ soared down, whoops of joy and excitement echoing off the cliff walls, and answering cries came from the ones walking on the roots that formed a makeshift balcony.

It was a bright night, Polyphemus and the other moons shining down to cast a blue-silver glow across the treetops. Fires burned at the base of some of the trees, and smells wafted up—viperwolf meat, lean and tough, but spiced just so until it hardly mattered. Talk everywhere; news of hunts, young ones learning to ride _Pa'li_, new children, anything and everything out in the open. A good night.

Jake was in one of the Hometrees, playing tag with some of the younger ones. He'd gotten a lot better at moving since moving fully into the Avatar body; it was easier to remember how to move when there wasn't a constant switch between a body with working legs and a body without. He hooked onto one branch and swung up to the next, then grabbed another and hauled himself up, perching on top of it with a grin and a laugh.

Then someone grabbed his tail, and only a last minute scrabble for purchase on the next branch up saved him from a nasty fall.

"You are it."

He turned around, eyes focused, heart pumping adrenaline with every beat, to find Neytiri. Grinning.

"You almost killed me!"

She flicked her tail, the grin never sliding away. "My Jake... sometimes you are still like a baby. Come."

She ran into the thick branches of their Hometree, and Jake, muttering thanks to Eywa he had survived this long, followed.

They didn't stay anywhere close to the Hometrees. There were long roots that made ramps to the ground, branches that had somehow merged into the branches of other trees, thick vines, all of which made it easy to travel and hard to tell where exactly the edge of Omaticaya land was. Neytiri laughed and smiled as she ran, arms out to embrace the night as Jake struggled to keep up. He realized now how much she had been holding back when he had first met her; if she'd wanted to, she could have lost him in seconds.

Then she stopped and turned on him, and he tried to slow down, overbalanced, and fell in front of her. She laughed again and helped him up.

"You are still learning. You have to keep up, or you will not have your prize."

Jake flicked an ear. "Prize? What prize?"

She ran off again with another laugh, still wearing the smile that he remembered from early on. The one she had given him under the Tree of Voices, and the one he had woken up to under the Tree of Souls. A smile full of love, not just for him, but for everything. For life and the life of all things.

He sat and panted for a moment, a grin making the edge of his own mouth twitch.

"Outstanding..."

He sprinted after her, the moss underneath his feet pulsing whenever he touched it. She wove through tree limbs, ducking under them or vaulting over like she was trying to imitate water. He did the best he could to keep up, but she pulled further ahead, and finally Jake reached the end of a branch and could find nowhere else to go.

"Neytiri!"

A laugh came from below him. He heard the smile in it and chased after her, dropping down to a lower limb, then the next, then to the forest floor. The entire carpet of moss under him was glowing, soft and lush--undisturbed, it seemed, by anything.

"Jake!"

He turned, only to find an entire clearing full of the odd red-orange spiral plants that he had discovered on his first day. He chuckled to himself, and then checked behind them to make sure there were no _Angtsik_ this time. His luck held.

He touched one, and it retracted into itself like he had seen before. Neytiri's voice came from the other side: "Jake..."

He touched two more, and then, abruptly, he saw Neytiri.

She had been lying down behind a pair of the plants, and was now frozen in surprise at the sudden lack of concealment. Just as Jake was frozen at her lack of clothing.

They stared at each other for a moment. Then Neytiri's mouth quirked, and they both burst out laughing—laughing for the sheer absurdity of everything as Jake lay down beside her.

"Prize?"

She turned to him and stuck her tongue out, a habit she had gotten from him. He shrugged and moved to get up. "Okay then, I'll just..."

She had him pinned before he had even lifted his back off the ground, eyes staring into his with an expression of playful warning. He closed his eyes, smiled, and lay back, content with the moment as it was.

He felt the cloth covering his groin slither off, and couldn't help himself from shuddering. He hadn't been with Neytiri at all since that night. They'd been busy with other things, and when they weren't, they were tired from having worked so hard. Barring that, he was still afraid she was angry. But now...

His hand found the end of his braid, and his other hand, sliding up her back, found hers as well. She didn't notice until he flicked it under her arm and brought his own braid up, and by the time she realized it the strands were already connected. She cried out in shock, but the _light..._

She fell forward onto his chest, breathing already heavy, matched with his. Their heartbeats synchronized, thoughts flowed into each other, skin and nerves mirrored and multiplied sensation. They opened their eyes and saw themselves.

They whispered each other's names at the same time, and when they kissed, it was fiery. None of the restraint and quiet, tender passion of the first time. This was something new.

Lips pressed against other lips fiercely, and skin pressed to skin without a single barrier, sensation pure and bright and everywhere. She felt him firm against her belly and she rose, and then slid down, a gasp escaping their lips as both of them felt it.

He rolled over on top of her and her legs went wide, arms stretched, and he pressed in without restraint, with passion. This time the pleasure was in movement, and there was no way to resist it.

He drew out, pressed in, felt himself touch against her thighs and drew out again. She moaned and he knew why, he trembled and she felt it, oneness of sensation, _tsahaylu._ They moved together, faster, and this time there was another difference. They saw the end, together, before it came, felt its contours and knew it for something else. There was always a reason to things. It was Eywa's way.

But the feelings did not change, and the pace increased. The tiny bright spots speckled across her face glowed, and she leaned her head back, mouth half open, eyes half closed but starry. And he was pressed to her, eyes closed, arms beneath her, faster, faster—

Light.

Warmth.

Two cries of bliss were lost in the dense forest, her filled, him filling, fullness and wetness and warmth, indescribable. They clutched one another and felt each other's pleasure, basked in it. He tensed and released, filling her more fully, and she clenched around him, a slow but steady rhythm as she looked up into the sky. The end was slow, like a long sigh, and they lay against each other for long minutes before Jake shifted, blinking, and looked into her eyes.

"Did we...? Did _you_…?"

She nodded, her hand brushing his face. "A girl."

He smiled, the first truly, blissfully happy one in his Avatar body.

"Thank you."

She smiled again, softly, and both passed quietly into sleep.

_Fin_


End file.
